DUBLIN — Real estate developer John McKeon stands in a half-finished penthouse apartment looking out to Dublin Bay, raising his voice above the clanging of construction on the floors below.

"It's great to be back building again," said McKeon, 40.

Among his biggest challenges now is finding enough skilled workers after the collapse of a real estate bubble prompted a flight of plumbers, carpenters and electricians, he said.

McKeon's family is building 59 apartments in Clontarf, north Dublin, on the former site of the Dollymount House, one of the city's most prominent bars. The family bought it at the height of the nation's boom in 2006 and knocked it down seven years later.

McKeon is being financed by Bank of Ireland as Irish banks start to lend for real estate development again. Their message, after a credit and property frenzy in the last decade came close to destroying the country's financial system: This time it's different.

"We're satisfied that the fundamentals are absolutely correct," said Ken Burke, head of business banking at Allied Irish Banks Plc, which this month laid out a plan for a 350 million euro ($478 million) fund for developers to build new homes. "This is something that we absolutely need to do."

Bank of Ireland and AIB, the country's biggest lenders, have set aside a combined 600 million euros for new residential projects. While the funds are minuscule compared with seven years ago, when AIB alone increased Irish property loans by a third to 30 billion euros, it's a toe back in the water.

After property prices fell by 50 percent, banks curtailed lending for property development. About 6,000 homes were constructed in the first nine months of 2013, according to state records. On average, 30,000 houses a year have been built since the 1970s. At the peak of the market, developers were creating about 90,000 homes a year.

That kind of statistic makes some in the financial industry, such as Jim Brown, head of Royal Bank of Scotland's Irish unit, Ulster Bank, reluctant to get back into the market.

"Property, being blunt, is one that we've enough of," Brown told British lawmakers in January. "If it's asking to go and do another property development somewhere, we don't have any appetite for that."

Brown's comments reflect the wounds left by the biggest real estate bust in Western Europe following a credit binge that ultimately crippled the banks. After prices plunged, British taxpayers, who bailed out RBS, pumped 14.3 billion pounds into Ulster Bank. Dublin-based rivals Bank of Ireland and AIB needed a combined 26 billion euro government bailout. RBS yesterday reported its biggest full-year loss since the 2008 bailout.

With limited supply of homes in the big cities amid tentative signs of an economic recovery in Dublin, home prices are rising. Prices in the Irish capital, a city of 1.2 million, increased 14 percent in January from a year earlier, according to the Central Statistics Office.

While empty houses abound, they're in the wrong places. About 1,300 unfinished housing developments still dot the landscape, mostly in rural counties at the opposite end of the country from Dublin, including Kerry and Donegal, according to government figures. Almost 300 of these estates were empty, according to a report last year.

Known as ghost estates, clusters of homes never occupied stand with stickers still on windows, driveways barely completed and protected by mesh security fences.

"We have a mismatch," said Rob Kitchin, a geography professor at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth, west of Dublin. "We might have all these unfinished estates but they're not where people want to move to and want to live. They're actually where people want to move out of."

Irish builders are starting to build again, mainly in cities, where homes are needed. Housing construction will rise 14 percent this year, gaining for the first time since 2006, the Economic Social & Research Institute said. It estimated that the Irish need 13,000 new houses each year through 2016.